Men With High Testosterone Levels Are Less Likely To Be Unemployed

Higher testosterone levels have been linked to a lower risk of unemployment and a better chance of getting a job, according to new study. Testosterone levels seem to be linked to job-related behaviors and cognitive processes, according to a study published in the journal Economics & Human Biology.

The team began collecting data from around 40,000 families throughout Britain as part of the UK’s Household Longitudinal Study in 2009. There are currently nine rounds of data in the investigation. Importantly, each wave of participants was quizzed about their present employment situation. Over 20,000 adult participants had their biomedical data, including testosterone levels, taken by nurses about five months after Wave 2 or Wave 3 of the research was finished.

Eibich and his colleagues examined data from 2,115 males aged 25 to 64 who acknowledged being either employed or unemployed (but not self-employed) at the nurse visit in order to explore the link between testosterone and labor market changes. In the succeeding wave, jobless men with medium and high testosterone levels were considerably more likely to report employment than unemployed men with low testosterone levels. Even after accounting for genetic variation, this remained the case.

British males with greater testosterone levels are less likely to become jobless and less likely to stay unemployed if they are out of work, according to the findings of this study.

The current study, however, has its share of vulnerabilities according to Eibich:

An important caveat is that the data used for our research only includes testosterone measured at a single point in time. We compensate for this to some extent by using genetic data to isolate variation in testosterone levels that is caused by differences in genetic expressions (and thus constant across the life course). However, further research using data on multiple measurements of testosterone levels for the same individuals would be helpful to gain a sense of how much testosterone levels fluctuate over time for one person.